I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Friday, November 28, 2014

After reading a lot of the comments on Reddit and seeing a lot of new
players come into the game, I wanted to share a few insights that will help set
new players’ expectations and set them on a path to success very quickly.

I’ll give full-disclosure here.
I want you to stay long-term. I
want you to love this game as much as I do.
That’s my only agenda here. It’s
a pretty mild agenda, in fact. Ultimately,
your experience with the game will determine if you stay. But starting the game with a compatible frame
of mind will definitely help.

So I aim to provide.

#1: You Will Lose Ships

You’ll lose ships in high-sec (ganks, as we call them, when you had no
interest in PvPing and were in the safest area of space). You’ll lose ships in PvP. You’ll do your best and you’ll lose
ships. Sometimes, you’ll go up against
people who have a half-dozen implants and fleet boosts, all of which make them
very, very hard to kill. Any player can
be killed in any ship anywhere, provided that his attackers are willing to
sacrifice enough ships and want to kill him badly enough.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

This post is coming out a long while after the release of the This Is
Eve trailer. Sure, I posted my initial
reaction, but I wanted to see how things develop a bit before moving beyond
the, “Fuck, yeah!” moment we all experience when that pipebomb succeeds, and
again when the bombing run hits its target perfectly.

I also wanted to see how it resonated with viewers a bit before
deciding which direction to take this post.
Namely, whether the discussion would extend beyond, “That’s awesome,”
into “Where do I sign up?”

But, we’ve been seeing a lot of new account creation. First off, welcome. This blog is about getting new players into PvP
by making it a little less nebulous and making them a little more familiar with
the concepts. There are a lot of things
new players need to learn for themselves (manual piloting, how important that
extra 50 m/s of speed really is for the way you fly, the specific way you have to
fly to maintain transversal to survive against multiple targets or larger
targets), the types of things for which “seeing it done” just isn’t good
enough. For that, you need to be in
space.

But there are a lot of other things about the game that you can learn
right away. A lot of those are about
framing your expectations and understanding the reality of a game, not just the
marketing hype or ideal parts.

A few bloggers have been writing about how the “This Is Eve” trailer
isn’t Eve… it’s just the best parts. Yes,
it’s the best parts, but it’s also an absolutely accurate depiction of Eve. The passion, the thrill, the exhilaration,
that’s all 100% true. And there is a
whole lot of preparation that builds up to those thrilling moments. For every one of those battles, those
scenarios, there were hours of buying ship modules, fitting those ships to suit
your taste, flying around to find the fight, and setting up the battle itself –
not to mention all of the experience and training that teaches all the pilots
involved to know what to do.

But it’s this very preparation that makes it all worthwhile. I used to play multiplayer Counterstrike, a
game with absolutely zero preparation required.
The death matches were, individually, meaningless, since I knew I could
just wait until the next match to fight again.
I didn’t have to do anything special, just sit there and wait. I wasn’t invested in Counterstrike. It was bubblegum I could chew or spit out at
leisure.

Eve is Thanksgiving dinner back in 1621. You have to hunt your own food and cook it
(fitting ships, moving them to your alliance’s staging system), you need to
message your neighbors to attend (fleet form-up and sorting, travel), you need
to carefully orchestrate the dishes in sequence (the tactical maneuvers during
operation itself, including scouting), and you need to eat politely so as not
to offend the natives (the battle itself).
And that’s all after sailing half-way around the world with like-minded people
(joining a corp, deploying). It’s
complicated.

And that’s what makes it so intensely satisfying. Eve players feel genuine dopamine rushes
during battles. My heart still beats
fast when I’m in a 1v1… and it’s the same whether I’m in a 6-mil-isk Incursus
or an 800-mil-isk battle Tengu. That
feeling doesn’t scale; it starts with a rush and doesn’t let up.

But it doesn’t happen with me for other games. The slow-build is a direct cause of that
rush, the sense that everything you planned for or waited for is coming to
fruition. That’s what causes the Bomber’s
Bar to cheer deafeningly on comms when they hit their target, or what causes Rooks
and Kings to be so delighted at their pipebomb.

And pipebombing and bombing runs, along with BLOPS gangs, are the LEAST
engaging of PvP, in my opinion! It only
gets better.

So don’t let anyone discourage you by saying, “That’s not Eve…” It is.
It absolutely is. Losing ships
HURTS, and it’s exactly this pain that makes your success so much sweeter. You can’t have a game with no lows, and only
highs; if you don’t have the risk of painful, frustrating losses, you also deny
yourself the delights of abject success.

Eve is a game that enables both.
And that is praiseworthy. Don’t quit
the game because of a loss. The more it
hurts, the more you should recognize how rare it is for a game to instill that
sort of investment among its players.
Eve players are passionate maniacs.
You can’t have passion without something to be passionate ABOUT.

Eve isn’t WoW. Eve MATTERS in a
very real sense to its players. We take
Internet Spaceships very seriously. We cherish
them because they represent time, effort, sometimes money, and always a lot of
love. And to care about a game that much
is a truly rare thing.

Eve is the passion that the players feel amid their greatest
achievements and dismal failures. It
inspires people to alarm-clock early morning ops. It inspires people like Rixx Javix to create beautiful
art. It inspires bloggers like me to
spend our time thinking and writing about Eve in the spare time when we can’t
play.

Monday, November 17, 2014

In the world of jump fatigue, moving RP's assets from Tenal to Deklein isn't just a matter of catching a couple cynos anymore. No, moving assets even two regions away is now a harrowing, white-knuckled excursion where your ship is slower than the rotation of the planets around the suns of New Eden.

Plus - and here's a tip for you - when your capital fleet lands on a gate, chances are very good that you'll bounce off of at least one of your fleetmates. I ended up 15 km off a gate after I was a bit late jumping. So that's an added bit of fun. Always "jump" instead of "warp" when warping in a capital fleet. Doing the alternative causes a hilarious* mistake.

* Not really hilarious at all.

But more importantly, moving a single capital on your own is a colossally stupid move. So stupid, in fact, that all capital pilots are now beholden to move ops, else they take a tremendous set of risks going gate-to-gate. Such a high risk, in fact, that it simply isn't done anymore. I sure as heck wasn't going to.

At least, that's my opinion on the new Eve. You simply have to make the move op, or you're SOL. My wife, however, has another opinion, which she considerately shares below:

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

So it
didn’t take long for that story to break… Yeah,
that’s my corp, Repercussus.One of our
CEOs also happened to be one of the Razor Troika.Another high-ranking member happened to be
one of the two Military Directors.

There’s a
lot of speculation about what this all means.
The article itself says it’s “confirmed” that “The reason for the move
is unhappiness over the current state of affairs in RZR and
dissatisfaction with the organizational structure as a whole.” This is patently untrue. The author of the article has stated before that he’s a friend of Dograzor, a member of Razor leadership, and it’s possible
he conflated RP with Razor. No one from
RP was approached by the author.

Fortunately,
I was already planning a post about our move. I try to be very honest about how I view the
game, who my character is, and what my biases might be. In that interest, my readers deserve to know
if/when my affiliation changes.

So, let me
put the matter to rest. I’m not
leadership, but I was one of the most vocal members of the “Leave Razor” camp
within RP (I know… me, vocal?). And this
is why.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Another brief one (Yes, I’m going to get to the big news of the week
for Repercussus, I swear…)…

This weekend, I surpassed 200,000 visits. That represents an accelerating increase from
how long it took me to hit 100,000, and I owe it all to my readers. Thank you very much. I don’t ask that you agree with me all the
time, but come at me honestly and I’ll treasure you forever.

As a reminder, please know that I don’t make any money off of this
blog. I won’t ask for donations, I won’t
include ads (when I’m able to control it; blogger may add them without my
knowledge). I do this blog because I
love the game.

Between 100k and 200k, I started being syndicated on EveNews24. Bobmon approached me and asked if I’d be
interested. It’s worth noting that I was
in the CFC, and he still chose to include me.
I really appreciate that, as EveNews24 lets me reach an audience I’d otherwise
not be able to.

Friday, November 7, 2014

This will be a short post. On
the o7 show, CCP announced the end of medical clone upgrade costs. And, apparently, some people lost their
minds. Reddit has a few posts about it,
and TheMittani.com has a feature article explaining why this change is a good
thing.

I have to laugh at the very idea that someone, somewhere, is upset
about removing the costs to upgraded medical clones. It’s a stupid cost added into the game that
serves no purpose but to discourage older players from PvPing in as many
situations. Who wants to risk their
150-million SP clone while trying to solo a Sabre, for instance? Answer?
Not as many as I’d like to see. Killing
that ship just isn’t worth the cost of losing implants, your ship, and the cost
to re-up your clone.

This change serves to remove an annoying PvP tax, and it should have
died a traitor’s death five years ago.
Good job to CCP to remove this brake from the PvP vehicle.

Monday, November 3, 2014

On my post about culture and tempo,
one of my readers asked what I’d write if I was tasked with writing Razor’s
mission statement. Challenge accepted!

A mission statement is nothing more than a summary of an organization’s
vision. What are they trying to do? How do they go about it? What do they value? Since it’s written by the organization
itself, it’s heavily idealized and subject to propaganda. Sometimes, the organization falls short of
that mission statement, but that’s okay, so long as it’s clear that they
operate according to it most of the time.

I’m not a part of Razor leadership, so I have no control over policy or
direction. But I’ve been in Razor,
through three different corporations, for nearly three years. In that time, I’ve heard a lot about what
Razor “is” and what Razor values from both leadership and its members. Based on that experience, here’s what I’d
write if tasked with distilling those opinions down to a simple statement:

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